Hello,

I played a little with EE on my Lion iMac, most examples worked well, some don't work well and some made my mac crashed. Anyway I got mostly positive impression about EE, and wanted to click buy, but found a little bit strange license terms for me, so I started to search forum about license, but didn't find case similar mine. Could you please help me ?

1. I'm single person.
2. I don't want to make game, I would like to make kind of 3D space/interface for communication program to interact with my family/friends (you could ask why don't utilize simple 3D libs, but I need Win/OSX/iOS/Android and have some additional needs for animation).
3. I don't have web site/project title and so on to be mentioned in license
4. I don't have any schedule about this project - it could lasts even several years.
5. I don't expect any income, but if project by chance will attract users - it probably will generate some.
6. Actually I don't need world editor/network/audio. I need good 3D with shaders & physics. All should be accessed from C++. All scenes (meshes, textures, shaders, ...) should be generated from C++ code.

So my questions are:
1. What kind of license do I need ? And what should I call Product in my case ?
2. As I understand from license, could get updates (even with bug fixes) only for 6 month after applying license. It's strange - BUGS should be fixed in any case. If I will find bug (in engine!) after 1 year what should I do ?
3. I'm going to work on my project for a long time and if I will invest my time and Esenthel will decide to drop EE it would be good to give access to source code for all customers. (I hope it will never happen, but still...) So what kind of assurance do we have ?

Actually 150$ is not big money to pay from time to time to good person (I hope Esenthel is for his time and efforts. But 750$ is already quite a lot and 4000$ is unreasonably high (at least for my project).

Thank you in advance.

Sounds to me like you don't need any license. You're not selling the application, therefore you're not making any income; hence, you don't need a license.

However, if you want to run the app on a mobile device (as you mentioned in your post), you will need to buy the Personal license in order to obtain the iOS and Android SDKs.

You get updates for free regardless of license (or lack thereof) and can always report bugs. I think you are confused by the "Adding Features on Demand" of the Ultimate license, which is something entirely different.

Thank you, Driklyn.
So until my project will not make any income I could use personal license (to include mobile version). But this part of license also made me confused:

Access to the source codes with updates is provided within 1 week (usually 24 hours) since receiving the License Payment for a period of 6 months (12 in case of "Professional" license and 24 for "Ultimate").

Looks like updates are limited. Is it true ? And in this case I have to buy new license every 6 months ?

I'm not sure where you are getting that from, but I suspect receiving updates to whatever "source codes" it is talking about is different from receiving updates to the engine. In fact, the buy page states, "License enables usage of all future versions of the engine." You don't need any source code to use the engine. It just allows you to see what's going on behind the scenes. You can still use the engine to its fullest capabilities without it.

Even without a paid license, you can program your entire game for PC/Mac. You just won't be able to deploy to any mobile devices or receive income. Once you are to the point that you wish to do so, you will need to buy the Personal license. You'll be able to run your application on mobile devices and receive income for that application at that point.

Driklyn, thank you very much for clear explanation.

Wish you inspiring work and good luck.

Had no idea access to source code's where time based.

In your case you can purchase the personal license to gain access to android/ios sdk's